Thursday, 18 December 2014

The
Alexander Technique deals first with clearing your thinking so that you are able to move in the direction that you
wish to move, and not where your unconscious habit would take you.

So, before
setting out, you pause to remind yourself to let go of your habitual tension
patterns. And then, after the pause, it is a matter of committing to your new direction.

Ultimately,
direction is a movement from point A to point B. But, in the Alexander
Technique, we’re much more concerned with how we
travel that distance.

In
bodily terms this “how” is determined
by a “primary movement” that comes before any actual step we take in the
direction of point B.
This “primary movement”, which has its definite physical manifestation in the dynamic
relationship between head-spine-ribs-girdles-limbs, is governed by two “mind” aspects.

The first
“mind” aspect is bodyawareness (body
map). During lessons we strive to raise our sensory appreciation of our body
parts, and their relationships to each other and to the whole.

The second,
and most important “mind” aspect, is perhaps unique to the Alexander Technique.

Having
determined "how" we want to travel from A to B, the Alexander Technique concerns itself
with making sure we start and keep moving in said directionin the manner that
we decided. What we don’t want is our habitual tension patterns to
sneak in on us the moment we spring into action and undo our “primary
movement”.

There are
infinite ways of getting from A to B. The “primary movement” ensures that we do
so in such a way that we’re not interfering with our natural postural reflexes.
Alexander called it “lengthening (and widening) in stature” which is akin to
“decompressing your joints for movement” or “creating space for movement to
occur.”

Two of the
top benefits of the Alexander Technique are health and posture. These are, however, not
exclusive to the Technique.

The objective of the Alexander Technique could be described as “lightness and freedom of movement with minimum effort.” But here once again the Alexander Technique does not hold a
monopoly.

What
distinguishes the Alexander Technique from other mind-body disciplines isn’t so
much what comes at the end of the process, but rather the emphasis it puts on how we get there. And the key is in the
THINKING PROCESS involved.

During Alexander
Technique lessons you get to learn some of the anatomical and physiological aspects
of movement, but this is not where the true core of the work lies. When we think about the structures that we’ll be moving,
we’re not as interested in the actual movement as we are in the clarity of the thought and intention
behind the movement.

The learning
process in the Alexander Technique centers on clarifying the thinking process that gets
you into movement. Alexander called it “quickening the conscious
mind.” It’s about working with the reasoning, discriminating, creative and
decision making capabilities of our minds.

If our
bodies are not responding to our conscious wishes
perhaps it isn’t because they are structurally unable to do so, but rather
because we’re having unconscious wishes that
conflict with our conscious ones. These “unconscious wishes” are made
manifest in our muscle tension patterns.

We fail to
realize this because the unconscious wishes have been there for so long they have
become part of our “self-definition.” To go in a
new conscious direction, we must first become aware of what direction we’re
already unconsciously heading in… and let go of the conflicting wish.

This is
really what the Alexander Technique is about: If you wish to go left, you’ve
got to first pause and remind yourself to stop your habit of always going
right. Because if you rush left without thinking, that is, without “inhibiting”
your tendency to go right, you’ll end up going nowhere fully or satisfactorily.

Thursday, 4 December 2014

Most sports and
art forms have an “ideal posture” to practice them. Books and articles on them
will describe this ideal posture, and sometimes offer muscular exercises that
will help you achieve it.

However, if visually
identifying what we need to change and doing muscles exercises to correct deviations
from perfect form were enough, we’d all have good posture and no one would have
back pain from bad postural habits.

This visual and
muscular take on posture presents 3 problems.

Firstly, it assumes that he
who receives the instructions knows his own body (has a clear body
map) and can adopt the recommended posture without undue tension.

Secondly, it assumes that he
who gives instruction and he who receives it, both interpret the concepts in
the same way. Truth is we all have our own conceptual and sensorial
definitions of our different body parts (“the neck” might not be exactly the
same in my body map as in yours).

Thirdly, it assumes
that we have to “work our postural muscles” with specific exercises, otherwise
we’re bound to “go downhill” with gravity and age.*

This view doesnot recognize that it is our heritage as homo sapiens
sapiens to be proudly erect without undue effort if we do not
interfere with the postural reflexes of our elegant design.

If instead we adopt
the view that nature made us upright bipeds, and did so quite satisfactorily, then we shouldn’t
so much “learn” to stand upright as “un-learn” to stand crookedly.

As homo sapiens
sapiens we’re inheritors of a basic “software” that enables us to stand on our
two feet in easy balance. This “software” is made up of a set of reflexes that
we integrate, with greater or lesser success, during our early development. Since
we all have the software, perhaps all we need is a little re-programming.

Hence, the best way to work on your posture is first
to recognize what you must “stop doing.”

We must go to the
deeper causes, to what is under the surface and cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Self-knowledge
is at the base of good posture.

* I don’t mean by
this that you should not do exercise to correct muscle weaknesses that go hand
in hand with bad posture and lack of joint mobility. What I do encourage you to
do is to work those muscles ‘functionally’ and considering your body as a whole
unit. You should be conscious of the balance and integration of your whole body
during movement, and not just work the “weak muscles” in isolation.

Friday, 28 November 2014

The problem is
that these “express”
solutions don’t last long; they are no more than a mask for the
problem, not a real solution.

The same happens with
postural problems and their “quick fixes”.

Posture is at the base of every discipline.
Every sport or activity you practice has a certain ideal “form” or “posture”
that allows you to perform the activity with the least amount of wear and tear
and the highest degree of efficiency.

But saying, “a good
posture is that in which, when seen from the side, the ear, shoulder, hip and
ankle are aligned,” is merely giving a visual description of the result. This
description does not include the steps of inner organization that allow for the external visible
result.

The postural recommendations
offered in every discipline have their logic. The problem is that we, who don’t
know our own bodies, force ourselves into these
recommended forms by sheer muscular effort. We end up habituating the
requisite form but also the unnecessary tension
of the effort.

How much better
it would be if we could adopt these “postures” with total freedom, and be able
to get out of them with equal liberty!

But… how?

The Alexander
Technique is a “pre-technique”, it is the foundation for all other techniques
and disciplines. The Alexander Technique teaches
you how to organize your body in such a way that you can adopt in the most
natural way any of the “postures” or “forms” recommended by other disciplines.

In fact, after
working with the Alexander Technique your concept
of “posture” changes. It shifts from being something “rigid” or “fixed” into
something mobile and dynamic.

Posture stops
being something you impose from the outside based on “how it should look” despite
the tense muscular effort to hold it, and becomes something that springs from
inside based on “how you perceive the shifting balance of your skeletal
structure” and guided by a clear thought process
which frees the muscles and decompresses the joints.

Sunday, 23 November 2014

There are few things as easy as
focusing on ‘what’s missing’ or ‘what went wrong’. What’s not so easy, what
needs to be learnt and practiced, is to note ‘what was effectively done’ and ‘what
went right.’

There exist neurological-evolutionary
reasons why, as beings who for a long time where some other animal’s dinner, we’re
predisposed to pay more attention to the possible dangers than to the present
blessings.

That is why we need to train our
ability to ‘also see the the half-full glass.’ This does not mean we ignore
that half of the glass is effectively empty. What we’re trying to get is an
image of the whole glass, with its
two halves.

For example, I’m starting to run
regularly. My plan is to do so at least 3 times a week and for at least 3 miles
every time. I have a full plan that includes speed runs, endurance runs, tempo
runs to build stamina… all the works.

Truth is I don’t always (or can’t
always) stick to plan; and it would be so easy for me to be hard on myself for
not doing so, and to focus only on how I fell short of my own high expectations.

But knowing how easy it is to see
only the half-empty glass, I made an effort to see the half-full glass too. In
that half I found the following: this week I went running 3 times (2 of those
at 6.30am), I ran 3 miles each time, once I added speed work. The last run was
with my sister, and actually we walked for half the distance, and ran the other
half, but I enjoyed spending the time together and being able to chat.

True it is that I didn’t stick to
plan as written, and perhaps that will put me back a few days to reaching my
final objective (that’s my half-empty glass). However, I did so enjoy filling
the other half! And that’s gotta be worth something too!

So, what glass are you trying to fill
up today? You surely know how far you’re from a full glass. Don’t abandon your
goal. But if you find that from staring at the half-empty glass you start to
become depressed, I invite you to look at the half-full glass too and celebrate
every drop that added its effort to getting you to where you are now.

Sunday, 16 November 2014

Yesterday, my partner Eduardo and I, gave our first
joint workshop on the Mistery of Stopping and Taking Root in the Body. It was the culmination of several
months of arduous work, of comings and goings, of long discussions on the topic
and longer practice sessions of the work. Finally we made it, and by yesterday
afternoon it was successfully over.

It takes a while to come to rest
after such an impulse. The inertia continues for a while. After such a race, coming
to rest is something we have to consciously if we mean to savor the sweet space
in which we do nothing for a while. It is a regenerative space.

It is not easy to stop and savor. The
impulse’s inertia makes me believe that there is stuff I need to plan, things
to do, processes to evaluate and new decisions to be made.

There’ll be time for that… tomorrow. Today
I rest. Today I do nothing. Today I enjoy what I’ve achieved. Today I don’t look at what could have
been better, what remains to be corrected and adjusted. Today I don’t look
ahead to the road that’s left to travel. There’ll be time for that… tomorrow.

It’s so difficult sometimes to just
stop and give ourselves permission to simply enjoy our achievements. We’re
always noting what was missing, what wasn’t perfect, what is left to correct.

There will always be something to do.
Every new achievement opens up doors to new avenues for improvement and
discovery. When we reach the top of the hill we always find that the road goes
on, that this hill has to be climbed down to climb the next one in line.

But enjoying the road implies
savoring not only the effort of the climb, those moments when we feel we’re “doing
something productive.” Walking the path also implies learning to savor the
rests, those moments when we “do nothing” other than enjoy the vistas of what
we’ve already travelled.

Therefore today… today I rest. Today
I enjoy the view from here. Today I say thank you for having been able to walk
this far.

Being of a competitive and
self-demanding nature, just being able to run for my own enjoyment is a huge
accomplishment.

It all started about a month ago when
my sister signed up to run her first 5K and started training. Something in her
way of going about it inspired me. My sister doesn’t seem to run to beat
anybody or prove anything.

So I started running too. Easy.
Slowly. At my own pace. Trying
not to strive for Olympic Gold just yet.

Still, the competitive-bug will come
flying and prying any time I lose focus. It will whisper in my ear: train
harder, run faster, run farther, make it worth your while.

So I stop.

I don’t have to “be somebody”, I don’t
have to win anything nor prove anything to anybody. Running is simply good for
me, for my body, for my psique.

That bug is no more than a habit of
thought, a habit of my way of being.

Therefore, when I recognize it for
what it is, I treat it like any other old habit.

I
stop. I greet it like an old friend. And I let it go. I return to my body, to my breathing, to my
inner organization. I remember my purpose.

Today my purpose was to run,
listening to my body, collecting my thoughts, following my breath. Only that
mattered. All the rest I could leave behind or watch them pass me by, as if
they were other runners in the race.

I return to myself, to the wonder of
being able to run, to the sensation of moving. I return to the present.

Friday, 24 October 2014

Today I’m
starting a new series of blogs in which I mean to elaborate on the 6
principles that I work from.

This is why, in
order to honor this new beginning, let’s take minute to center ourselves and
return to the present. With closed eyes let’s slowly and deeply breathe in and
out.

Today’s purpose
is precisely that: to talk about this action of centering and returning back to
yourself. I’d like to communicate to you a bit about how powerful and
integrative this simple act of returning to your body before every new action
can be.

We’ll therefore talk about the Principle
of Context and Content.

And since we’re going to be talking about returning to our bodies, it’s a
good idea to feel it a bit to begin with.

I invite you to yawn and stretch, move your joints a bit. Whatever makes
you become aware of the physical presence of this fabulous container: your
body.

Ready? Great. First the
theory.

Principle of Context and Content:

Context determines your
experience of the content.

This means that how you do
something has a direct influence on how you
live it. In other words, the conditions
in which you perform the action are fundamental to your
opinion of said action.

In terms of your
body-mind, context is determined by space.

It’s quite different to perform a physical movement with
space in your joints, than to do so in a state of compression and collapse.

It’s quite different to make a decision when you give
yourself space for thought, than when you’re hurried.

It’s a quite different emotional experience to get in a tiny
lift by yourself or with a close friend, than to do so with a stranger.

Minding the context
does not mean ignoring the content; rather it means giving the content the best
conditions for its manifestation.

The content (your ends) are the reason why you do stuff. If
you go to a talk on a subject that interests you, you do so because of the
information that will be imparted. In order to take full advantage of said
content, know yourself, know what suits you and what doesn’t, mind your
conditions.

Coordinating your
context is the first step in every action.

First we need to organize ourselves both internally and
externally; then we take action in the world. Certain people are born with natural
inner coordination. If, like me, that is not your case, learning to coordinate
and integrate your mind-body functioning should be a priority.

Enough theory, let’s get practical.

But first, let’s move a bit, shall we?

Interlace the fingers of your hands, rotate the palms outwards and
stretch your arms forward and up. Release the fingers and let the arms come
down slowly, drawing big semi-circles down your sides. Close your eyes and
shake your arms and shoulders.

Great. Let’s move on.

Today’s practical bit has 2 components:

1. Creating a Safe Space.

2. Stopping and Remembering Myself.

1. Creating a Safe Space.

a) Physical Space:

The place where we perform our activities is importante for
our sense of confort, security and freedom. All our senses are involved in
this.

- Look around and check if what is in your visual field is pleasing to
your eyes. What about the sounds? And the physical sensations? Smells? Company? Adjust whatever you need to feel safe and at ease.

b) Body and Mental Space:

Your skin,
your muscles, your bones, your organs, all of them give you consistency, limits and support, as well as fill up
your internal spaces. Learn to become aware of them with any of the following
ideas:

- Feel your skin by caressing it all over your body, in all the nooks,
crannies and crevices. Alternatively you can do so by showering, taking a
bubble bath, or standing in the breeze.

- Check out some anatomy images where you can get a general idea of your
bones, muscles and organs. Give yourself a loving massage while you palpate the
different bits, becoming aware of their consistency, elasticity, density.

- Alternatively, try out some of the self-observation exercises I give in
this blog, or this one.

Your
thoughts also have a quality
and consitency, get to know them and note their effects in your body.

- An excelente practice to discover the workings of your mind is to try a
simple mindfulness meditation, following your breath.

c) Personal Space:

The space that surrounds you is also part of your personal space. It pays
to recognize it and inhabit it.

- Notice how it expands and contracts depending on the circumstances. What
determines its expansion or contracting? Can you do so voluntarily?

- If you are sitting, note how you can integrate the chair to your
sensory system and “feel” where its legs touch the ground.

- With your feet on the ground, note how you can be aware of the floor
not only right under your feet, but also around your feet. How far can you “feel”?

d) Shared Space:

We share our spaces with living and non-living things.

- Note how you react when something or someone comes into your personal
space.

- Note how others react when you invade their personal space.

- Note if it makes a difference when permission to share space is
requested and granted, both in yourself and in others.

- Ask someone you feel comfortable with to take your arm and move it
around, while you keep your awareness in your inner and outer spaces. Do you
contract away from the contact at any point?

Let’s start with
today’s work by coming back to our centers. Shall we?

Let’s stop with
whatever it is we were doing and just breathe, allowing the air to reach our
feet and ground us. Let’s now exhale allowing the air to flow up from our feet,
through our pelvis, tummy, chest, neck, and out the top of our head.

The subject of
today’s blog is how
to liberate our breath. I mean to share with you three areas in
your body that it’s worthwhile to have free of tension in order to
facilitate the intake and outflow of air.

In order to
perceive the areas I want to tell you about, it’s a good idea to start by
creating a little bit of space in our joints. Therefore, I invite you to yawn
and stretch a little, like a cat or a dog after a nap in the sun.

What do we need to know about breathing in order to
free it up?

1. Breathing has an effect and is affected by all
your Self (principle of Unity).
When your body is free of unnecessary tensions, your breathing generates a wave
like motion that can be felt from your head to your feet, and which massages
all the inner organs. Breathing is also a superb barometer for your mental and
emotional states.

2. Breathing “happens”,
it “does itself”. If you don’t interfere with the mechanism by tensing up, it
works without effort or strain, and without having to think about it (principle
of Design).

3. Even when you
do not allow it to work freely, you still breathe no matter what. However, all
the added tension affects the efficiency of your breathing (principle of Use).

4. When you realize
that your breathing requires movement of your ribs (which means movement in
your sides and back, and not only in the front of your chest) and that it
generates movement in your belly, you can start to imagine which areas need to
be free to be moved by each inhalation and exhalation (principle of

Perception).

5. Since breathing “does itself”, you do not need
to “learn to breathe”. What you need is to learn how to stop interfering with
your breathing mechanisms (principle of Means and Ends).

6. And now that
you know that breathing happens by itself, next time your asked to “take a deep
breath”, you know you need to stop your desire to make a huge muscular effort
to suck in a lot of air. Instead, give yourself a few seconds to become aware
of the areas that need to be freed up to move freely and thus create more space
for more air (principle of Habit).

Ok, enough theory
for today. Let’s go to something practical. But first, do a shake out of your
body to wake up. Move your neck, shoulders, hips, blink, yawn, wiggle your fingers
and toes… or just shake out vigorously like a wet dog.

Where do I need to create space to free up my
breathing?

The places that you’ll generally hear when you ask this question are your
ribs (back and sides of your body) and your abdomen. And that is correct.

However, I’m going to tell you about 3 other key areas that need to be
free to allow the back, ribs and abdomen to truly release their tension.

I suggest you try the following exercise lying down in semi-supine.

1. Your groins.

When you create space in your hip joint for free movement of your leg,
you’ll find that the pelvic diaphragm, your lower back (lumbars), the abdominal
diaphragm and the lower ribs also release, as the pelvis comes into a better
relationship with the leg bone (femur).

2. Your armpits.

When there’s space in your shoulder joint, the neck, upper back and upper
ribs on your sides get a chance to release too.

3. Your jaw.

When you stop clenching your back molars and allow a little space between
the top and bottom back teeth, some of your face, throat, tongue and upper neck
tension are allowed to let go.

Finally, become
aware of the flow of air that goes in and out naturally as your system
breathes. When the air comes in, allow your jaw, armpits and groins to let go a
little more, feeling how the sides of your body expand.

When the aire
comes out, allow your diagonal lines to let go a little more and expand your
whole torso and neck, feeling how you thus grow in width and length.

If you’re feeling adventurous and want to play around a little with your
breathing, you can try making your exhales longer than your inhales, by just
thinking a longer release across your diagonals as the air comes out. This is a
great exercise to calm down the nervous system, for it slows down your
breathing rate without tension.

Always remember that you are not “doing”
anything, you’re simply “allowing” breathing to happen more freelyby
letting go of unnecessary tension and thus creating more inner space.

And since we’re
already breathing so freely, why don’t we go ahead and yawn and stretch
allowing our bodies to expand and contract freely?

This week, I
invite you to experiment and play around with these ideas on breathing, and
then tell me if you want what you discovered.

If you have any
questions, doubts or comments, please feel free to write it down below or send
me and email.

Let us close this
meeting by returning to our centres, breathing there, allowing the waters to
come to a stand still, and thus preparing ourselves for our next activity.

Friday, 3 October 2014

I tend to be a
bit hurried; out of my center. That’s why I like to stop when I do realize
something new is about to start.

Let me invite you
to center ourselves. Just stop with whatever you were doing, notice your
breathing and the sensations that arrive to your from your senses. Let’s inhale
and exhale together…or go ahead and YAWN!

Thank you. Now
yes, let’s begin.

In this blog I’d
like to tell you about what I’ve learnt about creating
spaces: mental and physical spaces, spaces within and without, spaces between
the stimulus and my response.

I’ll be happy if
by the end of this blog I am able to communicate some of this freedom that comes from giving oneself those spaces;
and if you don’t know anything about it, perhaps to tempt you to try it out for
yourself.

What has been your personal experience with
your personal space?

I’m going to show
you how I create my own.

I work from the
following principles:

Unity: If I create
space in my body, I’ll have space in my mind to think clearer.

Design:
My body is designed to occupy a certain space in full freedom, and it will do
so if I allow it to.

Use-Structure-Functioning:
When I give my structures their due space, they seem to work a lot better.

Improving perception:
When structures have space, I can perceive them better than when they are all
tight and pressed together.

Stop
and Choose: Since my habit is to trip over myself in my
haste to do stuff, I need to stop before acting, to give myself space to choose
better.

How over
What: I can only give myself physical space if I
give myself mental space too. How I give myself those spaces is important. That
is why, if I’m all hurried and frazzled, I lay down in semi-supine which gives
me the best conditions to actually stop.

How about if we
stop before moving on, and give ourselves a little space?

I invite you to
yawn and stretch a little, just to lighten up and air out the tissues and
joints.

Ok, so, how do I create my spaces?

The
first thing to do is decide which spaces need to be made available.

Where
is the flow of movement or energy getting stuck? Where is the tension? Where do
I feel out of rhythm or out of tune?

Once I identify
the area that is asking for more space to work better or to become integrated
to the whole, I look in its structure for some
points to use as reference, and try to understand how the area is
designed to work.

If what I want is
to create space in my feet, I can look at their bony anatomy in a book, and
then palpate the area in my own body.

If I have no idea
where to start or what to do, I ask for help from someone who know a little bit
more than I do.

I
choose two points in the structure that I want to free up. I touch them
simultaneously and realize there is a space between them. I joint them with an
imaginary line and imagine that the ends of that line float away from each
other, as if carried away by opposing water currents.

I invite you to try this out for
yourself. Choose some points in your body, join them with imaginary lines, and
alow those points to float away from each other. It helps to do all this while
lying down on the floor, with your knees bent and your feet on the floor, and
your head lying on one or two paperback books.

While doing this exercise, recognize all the space that is available between point
and point. You can also acknowledge the space around you, allowing your lines
to float beyond the limits of your skin, into your surrounding space.

This space that you create within,
without, between you and the stimuli that arrive to you, this space makes you multi-dimensional, it makes your
real, it gives you back to yourself.

I invite you to live from this space
and to return to it as many times as you wish.

Let’s breathe fully and deeply once together, just so we’re both on the
same page.

Ok. Let’s start.

Today’s blog will
try to explain why I believe it’s important to know
some basic anatomy in any attempt at trying to correct postural issues.
I’ll be happy if by the time you’ve finished reading you are able to recognize anatomical knowledge as something alive, in
constant development, something that grows from evolving ideas and sensory
information.

What attracts you
to the study of anatomy?

To beging with,
let’s recap the paradigm from which we’ll
look at the issue.

Unity: we learn with
our mind and with our bodies, and we consider the body as an integrated whole.

Use-Function-Structure:
we look at anatomy (structure) in relation to what function it performs,
remembering that our use affects both.

The Coherence in our Design:
everything in our anatomical design has a reason for being there.

Interferences to Accurate Perception:
our ideas about our bodies and the feelings and sensations we get from it don’t
always coincide, and sometimes our ideas are way off-center.

How above
What: It’s more importante to understand how it works,
how the bits and pieces relate to each other and to the whole, than to fill
ourselves up with anatomical data and trivia that we cannot comprehend nor make
practical use of.

The
force of Habit: Old ideas die hard, like weeds… they
come back again and again every time we let our guard down.

Let’s now
consider why it’s a good idea to study some basic
anatomy.

But before moving on, yawn and stretch. If
we hold one attitude of mind and body for too long, our bodies and brains go
numb. Move your tissues a bit to allow oxygenated blood to return to them.

Great. Let’s
continue.

Does knowing anatomy guarantee I’ll
have good posture?

No. If knowing anatomy automatically made you an
elegantly poised individual, then all doctors, anatomists, physiotherapists and
P.E. teachers would be paragons of good posture and carriage. Sadly, this is
not the case.

What’s the use of studying
anatomy then?

1. Good posture is a matter of
coordination. If you’re not
one of those naturally (and unconsciously) well-coordinated people, then you’ll
have to learn conscious coordination. In order to do this, you need to be able to feel where your different body
parts are and what they’re doing in relation to each other. And for this
you’ll need to know your most important bits and
how they feel.

2.Knowing basic anatomy (name, shape and feel of the main
bones and joints) gives you a common language to be able to follow instructions
in an intelligent way.

Even if
you rank among the naturally well-coordinated, it’s not a bad idea to know how you’re
doing it, for the following 4 reasons:

a) In case you lose
it and want to get it back.

b) In case you get
stuck in your progress in any physical discipline you practice.

c) In case you want
to explain or teach someone else how you do what you do.

d) To open yourself
up to other possibilities and choices you may not imagine you have.